Sachin and Adam
00:25:06 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:25:06] S2: On the more general topic of energy, it's been this marked shift where Silicon Valley are caring a lot more about energy all of a sudden. I wanna, like, sort of deepen out, like, why do you think people are caring about energy right now? [00:25:17] S0: Well, we're seeing energy as the bottleneck to technological progress right now in a way we haven't seen in a long time. I think the AI revolution has certainly shined a big spotlight on how much more energy we need, how fast. And I think for a lot of people, losing the AI race is not something you want to contemplate. Losing the AI race because you can't build enough power fast enough is not a place that we want to be as a country. And as mentioned, our adversaries are building a lot of new power generation capacity really, really fast. For various reasons, we've made that hard in this country. So, yeah, it's become right the picks and shovels now for most of the industries we really care about. And we have, like, I I think one sort of misconception misconception in in the the energy industry for a while was, oh, we don't need more new technology to be able to build highly scalable power. And yes, we do. Like, we clearly can't build fast enough to meet demand right now. We need more scalable sources of firm power. And if we can do that, we can live in a country and in a world where energy is not the bottleneck to technical progress, not the bottleneck to human quality of life. That's the world we're trying to build, and it requires us to to, yeah, build these new sources of power generation like fusion.
00:25:17 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:25:17] S0: Well, we're seeing energy as the bottleneck to technological progress right now in a way we haven't seen in a long time. I think the AI revolution has certainly shined a big spotlight on how much more energy we need, how fast. And I think for a lot of people, losing the AI race is not something you want to contemplate. Losing the AI race because you can't build enough power fast enough is not a place that we want to be as a country. And as mentioned, our adversaries are building a lot of new power generation capacity really, really fast. For various reasons, we've made that hard in this country. So, yeah, it's become right the picks and shovels now for most of the industries we really care about. And we have, like, I I think one sort of misconception misconception in in the the energy industry for a while was, oh, we don't need more new technology to be able to build highly scalable power. And yes, we do. Like, we clearly can't build fast enough to meet demand right now. We need more scalable sources of firm power. And if we can do that, we can live in a country and in a world where energy is not the bottleneck to technical progress, not the bottleneck to human quality of life. That's the world we're trying to build, and it requires us to to, yeah, build these new sources of power generation like fusion. [00:26:23] S1: And on a personal level, what's one of the use cases of abundant energy that you care about?
00:26:29 · Carrie von Muench
[00:26:29] S0: I... I'm a general believer that technology is a huge force for good. Yeah. And I think we can talk about that in a lot of different ways. I really care that we can make things in this country. I think if you can't make physical things, if you can't make cars, if you can't build houses, if you can't, like, build stuff here, we end up in a really, really bad spot. We think about our kids and our grandkids and future generations. And to build stuff, you need power. I think you can talk about AI. Right? People talk about that a lot. I think that it is one of the biggest technological revolutions, if not the biggest technological revolution of our time. And you can talk about how you wanna use AI and what this means for the economy and otherwise. But at the end of the day, we wanna harness its full potential and if we wanna be the arbiters of that technology here in The United States, we need to be able to more power. I... You know, personally, the climate mission matters to me too. I think it's important that we decouple economic progress and human prosperity from climate change, and this gives us a chance to do that. And so, yeah, I I think broadly, when you look you look abroad, when you look at what's happening in Europe, elsewhere, when you're dependent on when you're dependent on adversaries, in some cases, certainly people you don't wanna be dependent on for power, you end up in a really, really bad spot in a country. A Patriot wanna see us win. If we're gonna win, we gotta build more power.
00:27:40 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:27:40] S2: And what's your mental model for how energy relates to economic growth? A lot of people talk about it in, like, a purely causative way where we have more energy and then we just have more growth, better living standards. Is it more so that we we have all these things we wanna do and build and that requires energy? So then if we have more energy, then we could do those things. Like, how does energy and growth relate together? [00:28:03] S0: Well, I think it's it's, in some ways, a pretty simple supply demand equation. You just gotta keep the price piece in mind. So if you have more and more abundant supplies, something like energy, cost goes down to customers, and you can do a lot of things. Right? It fundamentally changes the unit economics of every industry that depends on a lot of energy, and it ends up lowering the bills for customers. Right? All of us are energy customers in our homes, and those those ratepayer metrics also really matter. So I think fundamentally, more energy, more power supply, lower prices, faster economic growth. [00:28:31] S2: Yeah. On on that point, so you mentioned it changes the unit economics of certain industries having lower energy. What are the industries whose unit economics would benefit the most, might unleash more growth in those industries?
00:28:31 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:28:31] S2: Yeah. On on that point, so you mentioned it changes the unit economics of certain industries having lower energy. What are the industries whose unit economics would benefit the most, might unleash more growth in those industries? [00:28:42] S0: I mean, it's all the industries that require a ton of power. So certainly, on the AI side, speed of power is a huge priority. Energy is a small fraction of the cost relative to the chips, but it still does matter. For advanced manufacturing. It really matters if you're looking at things, if you're looking at like chemical work, really any kind of, like a lot of our petrochemical industry today, any kind of manufacturing of different polymers and plastics, right, that becomes a higher and higher fraction of total cost. For the folks that are interested in carbon removal, that only works if you have really cheap energy. So I think across the board, if you're making physical stuff that requires a lot of power, tend to have a much better business if power is available cheaply, and if power is not available, you have no [00:29:21] S2: Yep. [00:29:22] S1: And when you kind of, like, struggle to sleep at night, if that happens, what are kind of the worries that kind of plague your mind? [00:29:29] S0: It's the mountain of minutiae. Yeah. And see, we're right, it's like, what are all the 4,000 things that need to go right in the next two months to make this project successful? Yeah. It's it's it's rarely one big thing. It's usually, like, the sum of all little things that need to come together.
00:29:29 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:29:29] S0: It's the mountain of minutiae. Yeah. And see, we're right, it's like, what are all the 4,000 things that need to go right in the next two months to make this project successful? Yeah. It's it's it's rarely one big thing. It's usually, like, the sum of all little things that need to come together. [00:29:44] S2: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm just staring at the flag, and so I had a geopolitical question come to mind again. But, like, you everyone's sort of talking about we need more energy than our adversaries, and, obviously, we're talking about China. So the underlying thing is that we need more energy than China. Why do we need more energy than China?